The Search for a Critical Mass of Minority Students: Affirmative Action and Diversity at Highly Selective Universities and Colleges

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory, M.A Anderson ◽  
Eleanor J. B. Daugherty ◽  
Darlene M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Minority Students ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Universities And Colleges ◽  
Selective Universities

Importance of a Critical Mass

2020 ◽  
pp. 82-95
Author(s):  
Carly Offidani-Bertrand
Keyword(s):  
Minority Students ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Additional Layer ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Campus Organizations ◽  
Campus Integration ◽  
White Professors ◽  
K 12 ◽  
First Time ◽  
Racial Ethnic

This chapter turns to the role of racial-ethnic identity-based campus organizations in helping or hindering students to manage feelings of being othered. Upon arrival on campus, racial-ethnic minority students find themselves dramatically outnumbered by White students, taught by largely White professors, and learning about White historical figures and artifacts. Because of the segregated nature of American K–12 schooling, this shift into suddenly being racially-ethnically outnumbered can be a significant challenge to campus integration. Mounting feelings of social isolation add an additional layer of stress atop an already difficult transition. Away from home for the first time, many minority students feel culturally lost as they begin their new life as college students. Students' perspectives on being othered ranged from feeling that their peers appreciated their differences to feeling stereotyped as the sole representative of their group. The extent to which they had counterspaces helped them process those feelings and celebrate their differences as diversity.

scholarly journals Would the Elimination of Affirmative Action Affect Highly Qualified Minority Applicants? Evidence from California and Texas

ILR Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 416-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Card ◽  
Alan B. Krueger
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Minority Students ◽  
Hispanic Students ◽  
Highly Qualified ◽  
University Admissions ◽  
College And University ◽  
Admission Rates ◽  
Before And After ◽  
College Application Behavior

Between 1996 and 1998 California and Texas eliminated the use of affirmative action in college and university admissions. At the states' elite public universities admission rates of black and Hispanic students subsequently fell by 30–50% and minority representation in the entering freshman classes declined. This study investigates whether the elimination of affirmative action changed minority students' college application behavior. A particular concern is that highly qualified minorities—who were not directly affected by the policy change—would be dissuaded from applying to elite public schools, either because of reduced campus diversity or because of uncertainty about their admission prospects. The authors use information from SAT takers in the two states to compare the fractions of minority students who sent their test scores to selective state institutions before and after the elimination of affirmative action. They find no change in the SAT-sending behavior of highly qualified black or Hispanic students.

Affirmative Action

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Hispanic Americans ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Administrative Practices ◽  
Universities And Colleges ◽  
The Usa

Affirmative action is a term used in the USA to depict a set of laws, policies, guidelines, and government-mandated and government-sanctioned administrative practices, including those of private institutions, intended to end and correct the effects of a specific form of discrimination. It seeks to end the effects of discriminatory practices that violate the inherent equality of persons who, because they share certain attributes such as sex or skin colour, have been denied opportunities on the grounds that they are inferior or different. Affirmative action aims to reduce present discrimination against members of targeted groups such as African, Native or Hispanic Americans, women, and the handicapped, and to increase their numbers within certain occupations and professions and at universities and colleges.

How Do Affirmative Action Bans Affect the Racial Composition of Postsecondary Students in Public Institutions?

2020 ◽  
pp. 089590482096100
Author(s):  
Huacong Liu
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Minority Students ◽  
Postsecondary Education ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Racial Composition ◽  
Ethnic Minority Students ◽  
Flagship Universities ◽  
Four Year Institutions ◽  
Racial Ethnic

This study investigates the associations between statewide affirmative action bans and the racial composition of undergraduate students at public 4-year colleges and universities in five states, that is, Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. I use the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data from 1999 to 2017, and find that despite having few selective postsecondary institutions, public four-year institutions in these five states experienced an average decline of 0.42 percentage points in the enrollment of underrepresented racial-ethnic minority students following bans on affirmative action. Further, the bans also decreased the enrollment of underrepresented racial-ethnic minority students at four state public flagship universities.

scholarly journals Testing and Diversity in Postsecondary Education: The Case of California

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Koretz
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Minority Students ◽  
Postsecondary Education ◽  
Hispanic Students ◽  
Student Population ◽  
General Level ◽  
Neutral Model ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Admissions Process

The past several years have seen numerous efforts to scale back or eliminate affirmative action in postsecondary admissions. In response, policymakers and postsecondary institutions in many states are searching for ways to maintain the diversity of student populations without resorting to a prohibited focus on race. In response to these changes, this study used data from California and a simplified model of the University of California admissions process to explore how various approaches to admissions affect the diversity of the admitted student population. "Race-neutral" admissions based solely on test scores and grades were compared with the results of actual admissions before and after the elimination of affirmative action. A final set of analyses explored the effects on diversity of alternative approaches that take into account factors other than grades and scores, but not race or ethnicity. Replacing the former admissions process that included preferences with a race-neutral model based solely on GPA and SAT-I scores substantially reduced minority representation at the two most selective UC campuses but had much smaller effects at the other six, less selective campuses. SAT-I scores contributed to but were not the sole cause of the underrepresentation of African American and Hispanic students. A race-neutral model based solely on GPA also produced an underrepresentation of minorities, albeit a less severe one. None of the alternative admissions models analyzed could replicate the composition of the student population that was in place before the termination of affirmative action in California. The only approach that substantially increased the representation of minority students was accepting most students on the basis of within-school rather than statewide rankings, and this approach caused a sizable drop in both the average SAT scores and the average GPA of admitted applicants, particularly among African American and Hispanic students. Although admissions systems differ, the basic findings of this study are likely to apply at a general level to many universities and underscore the difficulty of providing proportional representation for underserved minority students at highly selective institutions without explicit preferences.

The Death of Affirmative Action?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Scott Carter ◽  
Cameron Lippard
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Minority Students ◽  
Think Tanks ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Supreme Court

In the light of high-profile Supreme Court cases surrounding affirmative action, this book looks at the actors involved in the debate and what they are saying. That is, the book looks at who is setting the line of discussion in the Supreme Court by look at legal documents arguing for and against the case as well as the framing techniques they use to make their arguments noteworthy. Findings demonstrate that while supporters are made of a heterogeneous array of individuals and groups with a stake in affirmative action in higher education (e.g., students, professors, etc.), opponents are mainly represented by think tanks and other interest groups. Furthermore, this book finds that frames vary greatly between the groups, with supporters raising concern of what eliminating the policy will mean for minority students and opponents conversely arguing that such a policy is dangerous for our society and for those who merit inclusion into elite universities would not benefit from affirmative action. This book uses prominent sociological theories to put these arguments in broader contexts.

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